It sounds to me like the ECMWF and MET operate the same as U.S. roads. They are Not funded by taxation, but instead funded by tolls charged to people using them. Ditto our post office.
Where have you been living for the last 50 years? Last I checked, most roads in the US are free to use, not tolled.
Sure, they're doing a lot more tolled roads now than they used to, but that's because no one wants to pay taxes anymore.
The problem is that 90% of people who consider themselves "introverts" are actually just nerds with no social skills. The reason they don't enjoy interaction with others is because they're not any good at it. The cure for this, of course, is to go out, socialize, meet people, and develop their social skills. Try telling them that, though; they'd rather sit at home and brood about life. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Would love to stay and chat with you about how much life sucks, buddy, but I'm too busy out doing things, meeting people, getting laid, and having fun.
The problem with that of course is that the first part is a positive feedback loop. You have bad social skills so you don't socialize so you have bad social skills... It takes quite a bit of work to break out of that, the middle stages are rough, and not everyone can do it unassisted. Some just can't do it period.
Let me be the third to say that I wonder where the hell this security guard was from that not only 'bathroom' but also toilet weren't understood. I'm from Texas and have called it the bathroom my whole life. Of course, he was a mall cop, he was probably just an idiot.
As a number of other people have pointed out, the population of Arizona increased about 27% between 2000 and 2009. At the same time, cumulative inflation was about 25%. Thus, spending would need to go up about 60% just to maintain service levels. It is entirely reasonable to suppose that there might be non-linear effects of population growth on spending--that is, that some aspects of spending would need to go up faster than population growth to maintain services (for example, new highways might need to be built, implying large capital outlays)--and that cpi numbers may be understating overall inflation or ignore inflation in goods and services important to states (eg., large concrete or asphalt orders, prices of jails or schools or highways). Thus, a 100% overall increase in budget is not terrifically out of line with simply maintaining equal standards in various areas and perhaps improving a few.
I already told you where to cut. We lived for THOUSANDS of years without most of the crap we now have. We can do without it. Yes, it sucks for some people.
Yeah, and for most of that time all but a tiny elite lived brief, painful lives digging in the muck simply to survive another day. And the elite? Still lived worse than the average poor person in America. Thanks, but no thanks.
Except that it's entirely possible there are services upon which spending increases faster than the population. Take roads: a village of 100 people probably doesn't need traffic lights or paved roads. However, if that village happens to be on the new highway route between two fast growing cities, or even on the outskirts of one fast growing city, it may suddenly grow to a town of 10000, in which case all of a sudden it does need paved roads and traffic lights and who knows what else. And that spending, multiplied by 10000 such villages, may suddenly blow up much more rapidly than the population.
Read what I wrote again. I know that this lab will bring economic benefits to Kansas. However if one of the diseases it studies is accidentally leaked, the resulting damage to Kansas and regional agriculture could be well in excess of any amount of benefit, possibly billions of dollars. Thus, the lab has the potential for hurting the district and the state far more than the direct effects would help it. Besides that, it's *still* a stupid idea to put a major agricultural disease research lab in the middle of a major agricultural production region, like putting a nuclear warheads plant in Manhattan or a major human disease research facility in Long Beach.
If there's a 5 billion dollar project that needs a location you SHOULD be fighting to get that project built in your district.
Not necessarily. In this case, having the lab in Kansas probably hurts (or at least has the potential for hurting) the members of whatever House district this thing is supposed to be located in more than NOT having it would. Since the region is primarily agricultural, and the lab studies agricultural diseases... Any contamination breach could lead to millions or billions of dollars in damages for the state, and even more for the country.
And the representatives? Members of the NATIONAL government. Sure, they should represent their districts, and fight for them to get support and funding--but not at the expense of the national interest!
I doubt many of the diseases studied are water-borne. And, to put a high-level agricultural disease research lab in the middle of the main agricultural region of the country seems more than a tad idiotic.
First of all, all those words are in ENGLISH. Yes, some of them originated as French or Spanish terms, but so did many English words (that whole being taken over by Normans in 1066 thing, you know).
Second, yes France does have its own space agency. It is a founding member of the European Space Agency and (along with about 25 other countries) plays a fairly significant role in space. And looking it up takes a few seconds on Wikipedia, even I'm not that lazy!
Horizons and random events are uniformly distributed across all of humanity. If you must use the term, we are all equally lucky. It's only after the fact that it seems otherwise. "Luck" is an artifact of the human obsession for finding easy explanations. I prefer rational explanations.
Of course, and I was never disputing *that*. I was disputing the notion that chance and accidents of birth, parentage, etc. can be totally discarded or ignored when talking about someone's success or lack thereof, which is what you seemed to be saying.
Your sorry attempt falls flat, being examples of a lack of what you call luck. Clearly, for these people, luck doesn't exist.
This makes no sense at all. Luck does exist for them; it's just bad.
What you call luck is is a combination of personality traits that repeatedly puts the "lucky" person in a position to harvest opportunities.
And what I'm saying is that sometimes those opportunities are simply not available due to factors outside of the person's control or fall thorough (again, due to outside factors).
Their mindset and personality has an effect on how well they can adapt to their luck, but no one, no mattered how well prepared or organized or dedicated or ruthless or whatever, can reasonably expect to win them all or to have every opportunity succeed. Someone who is a whimpering idiot barely capable of recognizing a million dollars when it strikes him over the head might be successful because his uncle is the lead investor in a new, highly successful firm.
You do seem to be misunderstanding my point, which is that there is such a thing as bad luck...the outcome of chance events not going your way...and this can, and does, have an effect on real people, and real businesses. Someone may have the best ideas in the world, but not be able to publicize or use them. My point was not to defend calling some people 'lucky' rather to point out someone with the mindset and ideas you identified with this state may still fail. There were probably many other people with the same mindset as Cuban, but whose plans failed for reasons outside of their control.
Oh yeah. Your Russian Engineer. Right after getting his degree, he was offered an opportunity to emigrate and go to work for a small American startup. He decided to stay in Russia instead. Is he still "unlucky"?
No, of course not. (Though remember, I'm talking about the USSR, not modern-day Russia. It's pretty unlikely that he'd be allowed to emigrate) That is an example of what you're talking about, where your success or failure is under your control. Luck refers to situations where you cannot control or substantially mitigate the effects of something, and you cannot reasonably foresee and avoid that situation in the first place. The Soviet engineer obviously meets those criteria, since he cannot choose his parents, and even if capable of becoming rich will find that extremely difficult or impossible.
No, what I'm describing is bad luck. It has nothing to do with how well or poorly the individual or business planned. Even the best plans cannot cover all contingencies, some contingencies will ruin you no matter how well you plan for them, and some things you cannot possibly plan for at all. Would you say that the brilliant Russian engineer planned poorly in his parents?
There is no luck, just being alert and open to opportunities, having the courage to act on them, and having the intelligence to bend them to your benefit..
This is untrue. Of course there's luck, it's by definition what occurs that you cannot control or influence. For example, if you had lined up a deal to sell your company for a huge amount of money but then the economy crashes around you and the deal falls through...that's bad luck. Or if you're a brilliant engineer whose ideas would be worth millions...but you were born in the Soviet Union. Or your company develops a revolutionary new product...and the lead engineer gets hit by a bus. Luck controls the availability of those opportunities in the first place, and (sometimes) their success.
I mean, $500 for a video card is pretty routine these days I actually just looked up video cards on Newegg, and they were selling an Nvidia 8800GTS (a high-end video card) from eVga for $190. For myself, I use an 8600GTS bought about a year ago. I can play most games at 1280x1024 (my screen's native resolution) without any problems at all. Do I sometimes have to turn down the graphics a little (eg., disable anisotropic filtering or antialiasing)? Sure, but those options have a very small effect on the "prettiness" of the graphics anyways. Acceptable or even excellent performance does not in fact cost all that much today, not nearly as much as some would have you believe.
I saw them talking about it briefly on TV while eating breakfast a week or two ago; I doubt they would mention it in an internet article, since it seemed like a one-off from the anchor. Like I said, I agree that that possibility was not covered very well by nearly anyone.
Mostly likely they were just worried about sensitive technology...Of course this idea was never even remotely touched on Actually, that's not true. CNN mentioned the possibility of sensitive equipment being on board when the story first broke. However, I agree that that possibility has been mostly ignored by the media since then.
Re:Why Build new ones? Unless you want the Bigger.
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The Shadow Space Race
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Sorry:
With adaptive optics, interferometry, and 5x the diameter, I'm pretty sure the Kecks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keck_telescopes) can get pictures at least as good as the Hubble, at least in visible light, while the Spitzer can exceed the Hubble in infrared.
Re:Why Build new ones? Unless you want the Bigger.
on
The Shadow Space Race
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· Score: 1
With adaptive optics,interferometry, and 5x the diameter, I'm pretty sure the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keck_telescopes/%7CKecks can get pictures at least as good as the Hubble, at least in visible light, while the Spitzer can exceed the Hubble in infrared.
Slashdot Mirror
Where have you been living for the last 50 years? Last I checked, most roads in the US are free to use, not tolled. Sure, they're doing a lot more tolled roads now than they used to, but that's because no one wants to pay taxes anymore.
I think you underestimate how incapacitated the human mind can get. Especially when this leads to depression.
The problem with that of course is that the first part is a positive feedback loop. You have bad social skills so you don't socialize so you have bad social skills... It takes quite a bit of work to break out of that, the middle stages are rough, and not everyone can do it unassisted. Some just can't do it period.
Let me be the third to say that I wonder where the hell this security guard was from that not only 'bathroom' but also toilet weren't understood. I'm from Texas and have called it the bathroom my whole life. Of course, he was a mall cop, he was probably just an idiot.
As a number of other people have pointed out, the population of Arizona increased about 27% between 2000 and 2009. At the same time, cumulative inflation was about 25%. Thus, spending would need to go up about 60% just to maintain service levels. It is entirely reasonable to suppose that there might be non-linear effects of population growth on spending--that is, that some aspects of spending would need to go up faster than population growth to maintain services (for example, new highways might need to be built, implying large capital outlays)--and that cpi numbers may be understating overall inflation or ignore inflation in goods and services important to states (eg., large concrete or asphalt orders, prices of jails or schools or highways). Thus, a 100% overall increase in budget is not terrifically out of line with simply maintaining equal standards in various areas and perhaps improving a few.
Yeah, and for most of that time all but a tiny elite lived brief, painful lives digging in the muck simply to survive another day. And the elite? Still lived worse than the average poor person in America. Thanks, but no thanks.
Except that it's entirely possible there are services upon which spending increases faster than the population. Take roads: a village of 100 people probably doesn't need traffic lights or paved roads. However, if that village happens to be on the new highway route between two fast growing cities, or even on the outskirts of one fast growing city, it may suddenly grow to a town of 10000, in which case all of a sudden it does need paved roads and traffic lights and who knows what else. And that spending, multiplied by 10000 such villages, may suddenly blow up much more rapidly than the population.
Yes--in fact, the Hubble is very similar to a number of NRO sats. To the point where the same containers were used to ship them.
Read what I wrote again. I know that this lab will bring economic benefits to Kansas. However if one of the diseases it studies is accidentally leaked, the resulting damage to Kansas and regional agriculture could be well in excess of any amount of benefit, possibly billions of dollars. Thus, the lab has the potential for hurting the district and the state far more than the direct effects would help it. Besides that, it's *still* a stupid idea to put a major agricultural disease research lab in the middle of a major agricultural production region, like putting a nuclear warheads plant in Manhattan or a major human disease research facility in Long Beach.
Not necessarily. In this case, having the lab in Kansas probably hurts (or at least has the potential for hurting) the members of whatever House district this thing is supposed to be located in more than NOT having it would. Since the region is primarily agricultural, and the lab studies agricultural diseases... Any contamination breach could lead to millions or billions of dollars in damages for the state, and even more for the country.
And the representatives? Members of the NATIONAL government. Sure, they should represent their districts, and fight for them to get support and funding--but not at the expense of the national interest!
I doubt many of the diseases studied are water-borne. And, to put a high-level agricultural disease research lab in the middle of the main agricultural region of the country seems more than a tad idiotic.
Hell, CHRYSLER (yeah, Chrysler) had a nifty SSTO proposal that I don't think made it past the RFP. Still pretty cool, though.
First of all, all those words are in ENGLISH. Yes, some of them originated as French or Spanish terms, but so did many English words (that whole being taken over by Normans in 1066 thing, you know). Second, yes France does have its own space agency. It is a founding member of the European Space Agency and (along with about 25 other countries) plays a fairly significant role in space. And looking it up takes a few seconds on Wikipedia, even I'm not that lazy!
Of course, and I was never disputing *that*. I was disputing the notion that chance and accidents of birth, parentage, etc. can be totally discarded or ignored when talking about someone's success or lack thereof, which is what you seemed to be saying.
This makes no sense at all. Luck does exist for them; it's just bad.
And what I'm saying is that sometimes those opportunities are simply not available due to factors outside of the person's control or fall thorough (again, due to outside factors).
Their mindset and personality has an effect on how well they can adapt to their luck, but no one, no mattered how well prepared or organized or dedicated or ruthless or whatever, can reasonably expect to win them all or to have every opportunity succeed. Someone who is a whimpering idiot barely capable of recognizing a million dollars when it strikes him over the head might be successful because his uncle is the lead investor in a new, highly successful firm.
You do seem to be misunderstanding my point, which is that there is such a thing as bad luck...the outcome of chance events not going your way...and this can, and does, have an effect on real people, and real businesses. Someone may have the best ideas in the world, but not be able to publicize or use them. My point was not to defend calling some people 'lucky' rather to point out someone with the mindset and ideas you identified with this state may still fail. There were probably many other people with the same mindset as Cuban, but whose plans failed for reasons outside of their control.
No, of course not. (Though remember, I'm talking about the USSR, not modern-day Russia. It's pretty unlikely that he'd be allowed to emigrate) That is an example of what you're talking about, where your success or failure is under your control. Luck refers to situations where you cannot control or substantially mitigate the effects of something, and you cannot reasonably foresee and avoid that situation in the first place. The Soviet engineer obviously meets those criteria, since he cannot choose his parents, and even if capable of becoming rich will find that extremely difficult or impossible.
No, what I'm describing is bad luck. It has nothing to do with how well or poorly the individual or business planned. Even the best plans cannot cover all contingencies, some contingencies will ruin you no matter how well you plan for them, and some things you cannot possibly plan for at all. Would you say that the brilliant Russian engineer planned poorly in his parents?
This is untrue. Of course there's luck, it's by definition what occurs that you cannot control or influence. For example, if you had lined up a deal to sell your company for a huge amount of money but then the economy crashes around you and the deal falls through...that's bad luck. Or if you're a brilliant engineer whose ideas would be worth millions...but you were born in the Soviet Union. Or your company develops a revolutionary new product...and the lead engineer gets hit by a bus. Luck controls the availability of those opportunities in the first place, and (sometimes) their success.
I've read that story. The alien machine repels the hostile alien's invasion using the termites. Hope that helps.
To be fair, Arleigh Burke destroyers and Virgina (or Los Angeles) subs also have support crews much larger than their actual onboard crews.
I saw them talking about it briefly on TV while eating breakfast a week or two ago; I doubt they would mention it in an internet article, since it seemed like a one-off from the anchor. Like I said, I agree that that possibility was not covered very well by nearly anyone.
Sorry: With adaptive optics, interferometry, and 5x the diameter, I'm pretty sure the Kecks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keck_telescopes) can get pictures at least as good as the Hubble, at least in visible light, while the Spitzer can exceed the Hubble in infrared.
With adaptive optics ,interferometry, and 5x the diameter, I'm pretty sure the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keck_telescopes/%7CKecks can get pictures at least as good as the Hubble, at least in visible light, while the Spitzer can exceed the Hubble in infrared.